Facet
by meiousei
Summary: A series of seven vignettes featuring Kino Makoto.
1. Ghost

Author's Note on April 9, 2008:

This is a set of seven ficlets, which were originally part of a project I was doing for the 7crystals livejournal community. 7crystals was a lovely community with great members, but it's now defunct.

Each ficlet is inspired by a prompt, which is listed just before each story begins. I wrote these with a time limit of about 30-45 minutes. That entails thinking up the story, writing in down, and drawing it to a close within that time limit. I try to do them in 30, but sometimes I get a little more attached to a particular story, or it's harder to write. I do give them a quick proof-read before they get thrown up here. The one exception on this time limit is the last ficlet, _Dawn_, which took me a couple of days to finish. Hey, I figure I can bend the rules to suit my schedule.

Most of these are rated G (or K), though there is one with a higher rating, and the overall rating of _Facet_ reflects this. Relevant warnings are posted before each story begins.

Without further ado, I give you _Facet_. I hope you enjoy it!

* * *

Ghost

prompt: Corner

Every time Makoto began to transform into Sailor Jupiter, she thought she caught a glimpse of the Moon Kingdom out of the corner of her eye.

It always disappeared as the transformation whirled her away, but its afterimage burned into her brain, begging her to remember that what power she had now was nothing compared to the might of what had come before.

She never brought this up with the others. She thought that they probably always sensed that distant kingdom in their own ways - Rei in her seer's fires, Ami in the alien algorithms of her computer, Minako in the eyes of Artemis, and Usagi with the beat of her heart.

Although Makoto wasn't particularly religious - tangible subjects were more her style - she knew that this particular past echoed within her whenever thunder rolled overhead, and she imagined that she could see that ancient kingdom between bright flashes of lightening. She smiled a thin, sad smile when she felt the Sailor Jupiter of old stir in her a little when these crackling storms darkened the sky, inviting her to dance in the rain.

It was a very primitive urge, and one that she could not have explained even if she cared to. But she obeyed it always, and storms over Tokyo always found her on the roof of her apartment building, her shouts drowned by the thunder and her skin wet and fizzling. When the winds moved on, Makoto would curl in on herself, spent and miserable.

In her mind, Sailor Jupiter - the power of the Old, and of the Yet To Come - would smile at her, eyes full of earnest reassurance, and Makoto would flinch.

Makoto knew, in those storm-quiet moments, that Sailor Jupiter would consume her one day, and that everyone would consider the power of the Soldier as her birthright. Makoto feared the day when lightening would surge through her veins instead of blood, and wondered what would then become of all that she was now.

Then she would slowly go downstairs, take a shower, and bake cookies for her friends, grateful to be Kino Makoto for just a little while longer.


	2. Lapidary

Lapidary

Prompt: Heart of Stone

"Again!"

Makoto winced as Sensei snapped that word at her for what seemed like the millionth time that day. She got up from the spot where he had most recently pinned her, brushing grass and dirt off her formerly white pants and readjusting her ponytail. A bead of sweat snuck into her eye, making it sting. She blinked it away and straightened.

They had been at it for almost two hours now, and she had nothing to show for it except for a few nasty bruises and a long scrape on her arm from when she had careened into the side of a boulder.

Sensei waited until she was focused completely on him, and they bowed to each other. Then he was a blur of motion and she was doing all she could to block his moves. She avoided the manuever that had felled her the last time, and felt a brief surge of exhilaration before she found herself flat on her back with the wind knocked out of her. All she could hear for several seconds were the shrill rasps of cicadas and her own pained grunts, and the trees above blurred as her eyes watered.

She felt strong fingers around her forearms as Sensei pulled her to a sitting position. He examined her face and declared, "I think that's enough for today, Kino-san."

The tears caused by the shock of the fall immediately turned to tears of despair and embarassment, and Makoto looked away quickly before her teacher noticed. Her ears burned.

Whether he noticed or not, Sensei had mercifully risen and was walking away as Makoto fiercely attempted to compose herself. She had almost done so when he returned with a water bottle and a cold towel. He applied the towel to the back of her neck as she drank the water.

Sensei sat down beside her, and began to speak, his gaze fixed serenely on the waterfall on the opposite side of the clearing. "I have been teaching karate on this mountain for many years, Kino-san. I have seen students become great fighters, and I have seen those who limp back home, nursing their bruises." His fingers played over the grass at his side. Makoto fixed her gaze on that hand, so she wouldn't have to wonder if she would be the latter type of student. "You have the potential to be great. You are disciplined and generous of spirit. But you spend so much energy wishing that your heart is like this" - he held up a small pebble - "that it will be so one day, and not long after it will crumble to dust."

Makoto's eyes widened a little. The very reason that she had come here, to this mountain, was to reenforce the carefully constructed shields around her heart. Behind those shields, her heart was broken and alone, and she didn't want to ever expose it again. For what purpose? So that another careless boy would come along and toy with it? So that silly girls with their barbed words could scratch at it? So that she could be even more acutely aware that she had no family, and no friends, and no one else in the world but herself?

Well, and Sensei. She had him, after all. And the bruises to prove it.

Her master observed the small quirk of what might have been a smile at the corner of her mouth. "I suggest, Kino-san," In the tone of voice that carried more command than suggestion, "that you meditate on this as you spend some time under the waterfall."

As Makoto trudged wearily toward the freezing spring, she missed the grin that spread across her teacher's weathered features.

_That girl will be a great woman yet._


	3. Crash

Prompt: "Bloom"

Usagi once asked Makoto where she had gotten the earrings that she always wore. The air was cool that day as they chatted over their lunches, Usagi's hair shining in the sun and Makoto's meal looking festive and expertly packed.

Makoto's fingers absently brushed her earlobe, as if checking that her earring, in the shape of a pink rose in full bloom, was still there. The earrings had been a gift from her mother, a woman whose face she did not remember, but whose warm smile managed to linger in her heart. She hadn't taken the studs out since the day they had been given to her, first out of childish attachment to the prettiest jewelry she owned, and later, after her world fell apart, as badges of her grief.

She had been relieved after she discovered that the roses had endured when she transformed into her battle costume, a physical reminder that she was Kino Makoto under all of that lightening. She sometimes pondered that it would not always be so, but she always shied away from that thought.

Makoto smiled at Usagi, her best friend who knew she had drifted in and out of schools throughout the city, but who had never seen her tiny studio apartment with the single narrow bed. If Makoto's smile seemed a little forced, or her eyes a little sad, Usagi's attention was already focused on trying to sample Makoto's _onigiri_. Makoto used her friend's distraction to choose her words.

_They were a birthday present from my mother, who got on a plane with my father and died with him over the Pacific Ocean._

Makoto took a bite, chewed her food slowly, and swallowed. "Well, that's a bit of a story. Let me tell you about my parents."


	4. Superhero

**NOTICE:** Contrary to the first three ficlets in this collection, this story contains a fair amount of gore, and a very small amount of profanity. It is thus rated PG-13, or T.

Prompt: Lights, Camera, Action

The lightning bolt lit up the black sky, and met its mark with deadly accuracy.

The demon died instantly, showering its startled victims with bits of insides and fragments of scorched bone.

The air hummed with electricity, and stank of ozone and poisonous magic. The people around the body began to recover a little, and looked toward the sky.

Sailor Jupiter leaped from a high-rise, her hair streaming, and landed on the ground in a crouch. As she straightened, they saw that her green eyes crackled with ire. Too many demons had haunted this place of late, and the people of the crystal city feared the anger radiating from their savior. They shrank away from her, beginning to shuffle back into the lamp-lit street.

A low snarl sounded from the dark, and something dove into the circle of people, toward Sailor Jupiter. As the crowd around her fled in panic, she eyed the beast steadily as she muttered words of power, lightening roping at the fist she held before her.

The beast's red eyes regarded her with calculating malice, lips pulled back over twin rows of dripping, razor-sharp teeth. She could smell its fetid breath, it was that close.

It burst into action without warning, leaping toward her with claws extended and teeth bared. Sailor Jupiter just stood there, gauging the shot, and with a word she released the electricity that had gathered at the end of her fist.

The bolt punched a fist-sized hole into its muscled chest, but she realized too late that its momentum had been greater than she had thought. The beast's strength was waning, but its jaws were strong, and it engulfed her extended arm, just below her elbow. She shrieked when its teeth pierced her skin, and brought around her other arm in a strong left hook, her fist smacking its glowing right eye.

Something crunched, and she hoped it wasn't her arm.

It wouldn't let go, and she said the words again in desperation, each syllable leaving her lips in breathy little jerks as her knees began to buckle. Her free hand batted uselessly at the thing's head. Spots danced in front of her eyes as she realized that nothing was happening, and she thought she might be sick. She felt as if her entire self rested within those few inches of her body that bled in the maw of the beast.

And then she was feeling the electricity coiling down her ruined right arm, eddying around the teeth and gathering sluggishly at the tips of her twitching fingers. She gritted her teeth, her lips pulled back in her own snarl of anger and pain, and the release word snapped out from her tongue like a whip.

The beast's head exploded in a clap of thunder, blowing its jaws apart and covering her with brain and bits of skull. As she opened her eyes, she saw its body slide bonelessly to the ground, smoking and smelling of charred meat. Her mangled right arm had fallen to her side, and she inspected it with an air of detached curiosity. It was bad, but it looked like it would hold together for a little while longer. She thought there might be some nerve damage, and her left glove was soaked and red.

"Shit." She bit the word out, and captured the middle finger of her long right glove in her teeth, pulling it off. She knotted the glove around her wound, using her teeth and her hand to tighten the makeshift tourniquet. Something wet and warm slithered down her cheek and fell with a splat and an odd thudding noise, and she looked away from the deep gashes on her arm and at the thing at her feet.

It was a part of the beast's red eye, but the soft tissue of the organ surrounded a tiny cluster of rubber-coated wires and plastic. A camera.

She swore again, and much more inventively. A beast with a camera sent to fight in the crystal city meant that somewhere, an enemy was testing the waters, and they were smart enough to do it carefully. Sailor Jupiter hated it when the enemies were smart. She had enough to do just holding back the stupid ones.

She scooped up the eye in her bare hand and scrutinized it, noting with satisfaction that her electricity spell had pretty much fried the little camera, fusing many of the wires together. She narrowed her eyes, and closed her fingers carefully around the bloody thing in her hand.

She turned and ran as fast as she could, cutting over the rooftops toward the palace.

The Queen would have to be informed at once.


	5. Premonition

Prompt: "Dirty little secret"

Makoto sometimes wondered what she would do with herself after Usagi ushered in paradise on Earth. She had asked Setsuna once what Crystal Tokyo was like, but the older woman simply smiled and told her that she would have to wait and find out for herself. Makoto thought that was hardly fair, but it wasn't as if she was going to argue with Setsuna.

Makoto wasn't really a deep thinker, not like Ami anyway. Her friend enjoyed labyrinths of logic, while Makoto's meditation lay in the way her body felt when she landed a double axel. The way her muscles ached after a long sparring session with her sensei. How her wrists strained when she kneaded dough. The sting of her knuckles after she landed a lightning-fisted punch on a particularly nasty demon.

But she couldn't help but wonder when she turned off the lights in her little apartment and tried to fall asleep, whether she would be happy in that paradise she would help forge. She turned the question over in her mind, trying not to look too closely at her own gut reaction.

Something restless lived within her, a sharp knot of aggression that had once been blunted by schoolyard brawls, and now was sated by skirmishes with demonic forces and evil magic. But what would happen when there were no more demons to fight, and the last great enemy fell?

The fear that that little knot would grow into a festering abscess, lashing out at the tranquility of the new kingdom, was her own dirty little secret. It made her fight harder, trying to undo it. But it occurred to her, as she lay in the dark, that it might not be undone by the time the last demon fell.

And so Makoto wondered what she would do with herself after Usagi ushered in paradise on Earth.


	6. Harbor

prompt: "Homecoming"

Coronation day dawned bright and clear, and a scented breeze drifted lazily through Crystal Tokyo. Makoto woke with a hollow feeling in the pit of her stomach that she hoped was excitement, and not dread that she would screw up her lines. She had worked hard with the other three to memorize every word, and she knew they all wanted the ceremony to flow without a hitch. Although, she thought with a wry smile, Minako would probably be the one to come up with an interesting new version of her acceptance speech.

Three hours later, she was dressed to the nines in a gleaming golden dress that Minako had helped her pick out. Makoto had been a little bit hesitant when confronted with the plunging neckline in her reflection, but her friend had insisted that the color brought out her green eyes. Makoto put on a small show of reluctance, but secretly admitted to herself that she looked really good in that dress, all toned muscle and creamy skin, with plenty of cleavage to fill it out. Some part of her suspected that Minako knew exactly what she was thinking.

She sat up straight in the high-backed chair, with the symbol of Jupiter carved in the oak above her head. Rae, Ami, and Minako sat in similar chairs alongside her, but she felt as if she were the sole focus of the crowd filling the plaza before her. Usagi had wanted to crown them princesses again in a very public way, and Makoto had gone along with it. Now, she tried not to squirm.

Usagi had just finished her speech, and Makoto had to stomp out the urge to roll her eyes a little when the young queen got choked up while recounting all of the brave things her friends had done for her. Makoto loved her friend, but Usagi's public displays of sentimentality were going to turn into a real problem someday.

Then Usagi turned, and all uncharitable thoughts ceased. She was a vision in gauzy white, which might have been an unfortunate wardrobe choice on such a sunny day, but Usagi managed to pull it off and still look like a queen. And a queen she was; Neo-Queen Serenity. And Makoto was about to become the Princess of Jupiter.

Serenity stopped before each of them, announcing their new ranks and settling intricate tiaras on their heads. She could hear the others say the required words of acceptance and fidelity, but their voices sounded muffled to her ears. This was it. She wasn't going to be Kino Makoto anymore. She was going to be a princess.

A cloud of white drifted into her vision, and she realized that it was Serenity's frothy skirts. A beautiful tiara of cyclopean steel interwoven with delicate emerald oak leaves filled her gaze, and her mind froze. The words she was supposed to say stuck in her throat, and she lifted her panicked gaze up to the Queen's face.

And there, in the Queen's kind blue eyes, Makoto saw Usagi shining like a beacon of love and reassurance. Makoto flew into that gaze, clinging to one thought like a lifeline. Princess Jupiter would rule, and serve, and protect, but this little group of friends that she had would last. It had to last. Because in them she would find the strength to remain herself.

And in that instant, she felt as if she had come home from a long journey, and she was finally, _finally_ where she belonged.

The words unstuck from her throat, and she spoke clearly and perfectly.

The tiara settled onto her head. It was heavy. She could manage.

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Note: Thanks to LunaSphere for pointing out the typo, and for all the lovely reviews from everyone! One ficlet left to go! 


	7. Dawn

Prompt: "Where the Stars Are", which actually didn't make it into the story!

Makoto closed her eyes, welcoming the warmth of the coffee as it slid smoothly down her throat. The strong taste of it lingered on her tongue, and she rolled it around her mouth for a few quiet, precious seconds. She eyed the spotless glass doors that opened up into the street. The dark night sky was just starting to flirt with the grey fingers of dawn, and Makoto knew it was almost time.

A smaller door behind her opened with a bang, but Makoto barely blinked. A chaos of noise invaded the still air, and a fresh wave of the scent of baking pastry mingled with the robust aroma of brewing coffee. Nariko struggled through the door with a steaming tray of hot rolls. Makoto watched silently as Nariko expertly slid the tray into the glass case and flicked on the light to illuminate them. She had come a long way, Makoto reflected, from the sullen high school student looking to make a little money waiting tables. Much to their mutual surprise, Nariko shared Makoto's love and instinct for baking, and she had stayed on as an apprentice after she graduated. Makoto, stretched increasingly thin as her business expanded, welcomed her help.

Makoto pressed a fresh cup of coffee into Nariko's hand, and her friend smiled thankfully. They talked a little, though Makoto kept one eye on the sky. Her other morning baker, Ryoji, would be nearly finished with the croissants, and she would be needing at least a few of those very soon.

Her timing was perfect. She unlocked the door just as the first two silhouettes appeared on the street, one very tall and clean-cut, and the other curvy and short, with unmistakable hair. She returned Usagi and Mamoru's grins as she opened the door for them, while Nariko poured two extra cups of coffee.

"Hi, Mako! Hi Nariko!" Usagi was getting much better about improving her morning energy levels. Makoto suspected it was because she had Mamoru to wake up to. Usagi grabbed her coffee and headed straight for the cream and sugar counter, adding copious amounts of both to her mug.

"Hey Nariko, hope that coffee is blacker than the pit of doom. I've got a double shift at the hospital today." Just hearing about Mamoru's crazy medical student schedule made Makoto's head spin. She watched as Usagi's fingers brushed his.

"Oi, Mamoru. You'd better take another cup to go. On the house." She smiled at him, and he glanced at her gratefully.

The door opened again, and Rei appeared, looking for breakfast and friendly faces before her journey back to Hikawa Shrine. Rei arose very early each day to come to this place, but she always managed to look fresh and glowing. Makoto wished she knew Rei's secret - she needed at least one cup of coffee each morning just to see straight.

Ami followed closely behind, looking exhausted and her school bag packed to bursting. She headed straight for Mamoru, who realized her intent and took a big swallow of his blacker-than-the-pit-of-doom coffee. Her medical school exams were coming up, and she wanted some advice. Makoto greeted them both, and they smiled hugely when she plied them with rolls and coffee.

Minako stumbled in at last, looking a little rumpled but cheerful. Makoto could see Artemis's glowing green eyes peering out from her bag. Makoto waved at him, and he winked back at her. Minako stopped for her food and coffee, and settled in next to Usagi, brandishing the latest edition of their favorite magazine. Makoto slipped a roll into the bag for Artemis, laughing when Minako said just what she was going to do him if she found crumbs inside her new bag. Artemis ignored her, purred exuberantly at Makoto, and tucked into his breakfast.

Other customers trickled in and out, but Nariko and Ryoji took care of them. It was an unspoken agreement they had with their boss; this hour of the morning belonged to Makoto and her friends. Makoto congratulated herself daily on hiring excellent help.

As the minutes passed, the members of their little group soaked up each other's company. Makoto loved these quiet mornings, when they were all free to just be together, before everyone got whisked back into their busy lives. This wouldn't last, and she forbade herself from hoping it would. A kingdom would be founded soon, and they would all play their parts in its making and its keeping. When that day happened, Makoto Kino who owned a bakery on the corner would have other duties, responsibilities where lives hung in the balance. They all knew this, and that was why they came. They were clinging to the edge of normalcy in a world they knew would change any instant, and this little life, this little time, was their goodbye to their childhoods. Makoto was happy that they had this chance to cling.

One by one, they slipped away into the world, off to work or school. Mamoru accepted his second cup of coffee, stooped to kiss Usagi, and strode out the door. Only Usagi was left now, looking at Makoto with an unreadable expression.

"Thanks for this, Mako," Usagi said, softly.

Something in her eyes glittered briefly, but it was gone before Makoto could identify it.

"You're welcome, Usa." Her voice scraped across her tongue.

Usagi smiled, turned, and walked out the door into the sun. Makoto smiled a small smile that hovered on her face like a shadow, and began to clear the table.

It was almost time.

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Note: I remember reading once that Makoto's dream was to run a cake shop, but I've never read any fic of her actually doing so (her love of baking is often retained, though). The cake shop here has pretty much been transformed into a general bakery, but I bet Mako makes cakes to order. Time-wise, I imagine this fits in sometime between the Galaxia wars and the establishment of Crystal Tokyo.


End file.
